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  • Marcel Holtmann's avatar
    net: Add DEVTYPE support for Ethernet based devices · 384912ed
    Marcel Holtmann authored
    
    
    The Ethernet framing is used for a lot of devices these days. Most
    prominent are WiFi and WiMAX based devices. However for userspace
    application it is important to classify these devices correctly and
    not only see them as Ethernet devices. The daemons like HAL, DeviceKit
    or even NetworkManager with udev support tries to do the classification
    in userspace with a lot trickery and extra system calls. This is not
    good and actually reaches its limitations. Especially since the kernel
    does know the type of the Ethernet device it is pretty stupid.
    
    To solve this problem the underlying device type needs to be set and
    then the value will be exported as DEVTYPE via uevents and available
    within udev.
    
      # cat /sys/class/net/wlan0/uevent
      DEVTYPE=wlan
      INTERFACE=wlan0
      IFINDEX=5
    
    This is similar to subsystems like USB and SCSI that distinguish
    between hosts, devices, disks, partitions etc.
    
    The new SET_NETDEV_DEVTYPE() is a convenience helper to set the actual
    device type. All device types are free form, but for convenience the
    same strings as used with RFKILL are choosen.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMarcel Holtmann <marcel@holtmann.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    384912ed